I’m writing to you with a few seasonal offerings this week, beginning with the ebook edition of Writing at the Wellspring, now on sale for $2.99 through November 30.

I’m offering the reduced price in conjunction with the reopening of my Wellspring course at Weirdosphere (see below). Whether you’re interested in joining the course or simply reading the book, this is a good opportunity to pick up a copy.

There’s also some free music made by me, if you haven’t already collected it, and a Halloween dispatch from my other life in higher education, plus a musical recommendation involving Blue Öyster Cult for the enhancement of the autumn season.

Return to the Wellspring

The book

My book Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius explores creativity as a relationship with something inside us, and beyond us, that we don’t entirely understand or control. It’s about learning to listen to that source, finding our way through resistance and silence, and recognizing how our creative work connects with the larger unfolding of our lives in a movement toward waking up to the truth of ourselves and the world.

If those concerns sound familiar from my recent essay “The Haunting That Is You,” that’s because they’re different approaches to the same fascination. I delve into them most deeply in Writing at the Wellspring.

The course

Complementing and incorporating the book, the Wellspring course offers a way to explore these things through your own writing and other creative work. I originally taught it for the Weirdosphere community in fall 2024. The course draws on both Writing at the Wellspring and my other book on creativity for writers, A Course in Demonic Creativity. This reopening includes:

• All five modules, with notes, suggested readings, discussion prompts, and exercises.
• Recordings of my original lectures and office hours, available to work through at your own pace.
• A new live, interactive Zoom session with me on Sunday, December 6, at 3 p.m. Eastern. The recording of this session will also be added to the archived course materials.

Enrollment is open for a limited time. The regular price is $180, but free subscribers to this newsletter receive $45 off, bringing it to $135.

You’ll find the discount code at the bottom of this post.

If you took the original course, you’re warmly invited to revisit the material and join the December gathering at no additional charge. I’d love to hear what has stayed with you, what has changed, and what may have come out of your creative life since we last met.

Some music for the season

My album of original instrumental music, Daemonyx: Curse of the Daimon, is available as a free digital download for newsletter subscribers, along with a booklet containing track notes, influences, and the story of the album’s creation. A free subscription here is all you need.

The music encompasses electronica, rock, metal, and orchestral textures. I have described it over the years as essentially a dark film soundtrack, which makes the current October season a particularly appropriate time of year for sharing it again.

Sign in with your subscriber email address to access the files.

For those who prefer a physical copy, I also have a limited number of CDs available for purchase, featuring Jason Van Hollander’s cover art and design. Shipping is available within the continental United States.

And if you’re curious about where this other part of my creative life came from, I recently told the story in “Daemonyx: The story behind my music.” The short version is that I composed and created this music two decades ago as part of the same creative uprush that produced many of my stories combining religion and spirituality with weird horror and an interrogation of the mystery of art and creativity.

A return to Session 9

This week I had the pleasure of introducing the sublime 2001 horror film Session 9 as the final screening in the inaugural Fright Fest series at the University of Arkansas at Northark, where I serve as vice chancellor for academic affairs.

Over four October evenings, the series featured Suspiria, Creepshow, The Fearless Vampire Killers, and then Session 9, each presented by a different member of our college community. The screenings were for students in participating classes, whose professors offered credit for attending and responding interpretively to the films.

Introducing Session 9 again brought back memories. Fifteen years ago, I included this movie in The Dark Mirror, the horror film festival that I co-founded with Baylor film scholar Jim Kendrick while I was working at McLennan Community College in Waco, Texas. Our 2011 theme was “Horror and the Soul.” The Baylor Lariat covered that year’s event, including my introduction to Session 9, in this article from the archives. I later founded and ran an annual horror film festival for five years at another college in Texas. Sharing these films with students has been a recurring pleasure across several chapters of my teaching and working life.

There’s also a connection between Session 9 and another classic horror item that some of you might find interesting. In “Empedocles,” a 2001 episode of The X-Files, a mild-mannered office worker loses his job, witnesses a fatal car crash, and becomes a murderer, apparently possessed by an evil that passes from person to person.

When I first watched this episode just a few years ago, having been a big X-Files fan in the series’ early years but then falling off during the final seasons, I was thunderstruck by how directly it echoed Session 9, which was likewise released in 2001. The idea of evil as a transmissible disease or spirit, entering people at wounded and vulnerable moments, is deeply compelling. To my eyes, it also lies at the heart of Session 9, which explores it with subtle and sophisticated brilliance while leaving the door open to multiple interpretations of the actual nature of what we’re witnessing.

I still wonder sometimes about what was going on in the cultural psyche leading up to 2001 that brought this shared preoccupation to the surface in two such different stories. In any event, I heartily recommend both the movie and the X-Files episode.

I love this time of year

And to close, one final autumn offering: Blue Öyster Cult’s “Harvest Moon,” from their 1998 album Heaven Forbid. BÖC has been special to me since my youth, and for more than two decades this song has been perhaps my favorite music for welcoming the blessed autumn season.

As it happens, “Harvest Moon” is also a classic weird horror tale in miniature. It tells of an old farmstead in rural America that bears the legacy of something dark inhabiting the landscape, as the song’s narrator learned from his grandmother before she passed away and he moved into an old house on the property. Centuries ago, Spanish settlers burned their towns and fields before leaving. Later, the Coby family tried raising sheep and goats on the property, but then left for other climes when they lost all their livestock in some mysterious calamity involving an early snow. The narrator eventually decides to sell the farm and leave as well, having seen enough during his decade living there — including the disappearance of people in winter whose bodies are then discovered during the spring thaw — to understand that while people come and go in this cursed landscape, the dark force living in the land remains.

This all unfolds in verses built around a chorus that expresses an almost irresistible love for the season “when the wind turns and blows the leaves from the trees,” as outward changes in the natural world begin to mingle and correspond with inward shifts in perception and mood:

I see the days grow shorter
I feel the nights grow cold
Young people feeling restless
Old people feeling old

And then:

I sense the darkness clearer
I feel a presence here
A change in the weather
I love this time of year

That mingling of seasonal exhilaration with lurking dread is enchanting to me. Founding band member, co-lead vocalist, and guitar god Donald Roeser, better known as Buck Dharma, wrote the song, and the band performed it live for years before its release on Heaven Forbid. To me, it’s an exquisite example of his particular genius for making something ominous feel so musically inviting that you want to return to it repeatedly — a gift also evident in the more widely known “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” which Buck likewise wrote.

Here in the “real world” of North Arkansas where I live, this year’s autumn season has been unseasonably warm, and sometimes downright hot. So “Harvest Moon” has been helping me feel, in my imagination, the turning of the weather that the actual weather has been withholding.

Whether autumn is now arriving where you live, refusing to arrive, or simply isn’t part of your local experience, I offer this as a little musical accompaniment to the season. I hope it brings some of that same dark pleasure to you.

WATCH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vVU7MyK9fQ

Happy Halloween, and thank you, as always, for reading.

Your Wellspring course discount

Newsletter subscribers can enroll in Writing at the Wellspring for $135 instead of $180. Use the code below with the course purchase link.

The Writing at the Wellspring ebook is $2.99 through November 30.

If you’re new here, subscribe for free to access the offer.